90% of Workers Agree: Career Mashups Are Part of the Future of Work

It’s something I’ve said before but I think it bears repeating: more than half of the U.S. workers in their 20s and 30s believe their employer should be responsible for preparing them for the future of work. Millennials and Gen-Z also made up 46% of the full-time workforce according to Gallup’s 2018 poll.

So, in this newsletter, I want to focus on one specific career goal related to the future of work that is so ubiquitous business leaders simply can’t keep ignoring it — managing multiple careers simultaneously is a goal for 90% of workers. 

On top of that, half of those in their 20s believe they *have* to change roles and jobs often if they hope to be successful in their careers. This is inevitable.

Career Mashups: What Are They & How Do They Impact Organizations?

The Career Mashup is the career of the future (and present), in which workers are able to merge their breadth of skills, interests, passions, and experiences into a career that fits a person's whole self. That hybrid may be something that happens in a particular role or position in a current or future job, or it could be parallel pathing multiple jobs at once.

The 2019 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends introduced a similar concept they called superjobs, “which require the breadth of technical and soft skills that hybrid jobs do—but also combine parts of different traditional jobs into integrated roles that leverage the significant productivity and efficiency gains that can arise when people work with smart machines, data, and algorithms.”

Jobs will keep transforming like this every time new technologies, ideas, and marketplaces are introduced, and Deloitte predicts that the highest-in-demand and highest-paying jobs over the next decade will be these “hybrid jobs” that mash up technical skills and soft skills.

There are two factors that I believe are really driving this change in what careers look like and this attitude among younger workers: an increasing desire to work on things you’re passionate about and a need to manage risk.

And I don’t see these attitudes reversing. The oldest Millennials entered the workforce during a recession and, before that, they saw their parents feeling unfulfilled in the organizations they long worked for. Even as they stayed loyal the companies they worked for did it. Then the oldest Gen-Zs entered the workforce right before COVID-19 and were exposed to all sorts of economic and social instability, much of it disproportionately impacting young people. And young workers are not the only ones who have had a renewed sense of purpose since 2020.

This is just to underscore, again, that organizations need to be prioritizing the priorities of their people or they will leave — and almost all of their people want the opportunity to manage multiple careers simultaneously. 

Embracing career mashups, portfolio careers, polywork — whatever you want to call it — doesn't mean you won’t have full-time workers anymore. It doesn’t mean all of the best workers will leave. But they will work differently and they will have more freedom over how they spend their time. Relinquishing that control might be difficult for some organizations, but the results also might surprise you.

You unlock a lot of efficiencies and potential when your teams are set up to allow people to work on multiple roles, when people are able to focus on things that make them feel fulfilled, when people are empowered to start a side gig and bring those learnings back into your organization. A lot of organizations in the tech industry have benefited from this agile structure already, but we can still do more.

As business leaders, we can make the future of work better than the past of work.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn as part of Connie Steele’s monthly newsletter, The Human Side of Work. You can find the original article and subscribe to the newsletter at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/90-workers-agree-career-mashups-part-future-work-connie-wang-steele.